Why WhatsApp is the new BBC

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Cable TV came to India in late 1991 and early 1992. Before that large parts of the country could view only one television channel and that was the government owned Doordarshan.

Doordarshan continued to remain a force to reckon with as long as it had monopoly on news broadcasting. The irony was that most people who took their news seriously, would believe something only when they had heard it on BBC radio.

In fact, even those who did not take their news seriously but wanted to push their point of view, would claim to have heard some piece of news originally on the BBC. The point being that just saying that you had heard it originally on the BBC, even if you had not, gave the whole point of view that you were trying to push, a lot more credibility.

The rise of cable TV essentially ensured that people largely stopped watching Doordarshan, at least in urban areas. The other thing that happened was that people stopped tuning into short wave radio as well to listen to the BBC radio service.

Dear Reader, you must be wondering why am I writing about this, nearly two decades later? Is it a burst of nostalgia? Perhaps. But more importantly I am just trying to make a comparison. In the 1990s, people used to believe the BBC, which had inherently more credibility than anything else, now they believe whatever has been sent to them on WhatsApp.

I have had people arguing with me on the merits and demerits of demonetisation on the basis of long WhatsApp forwards that they have received. It’s like the 1990s when people wanting to push their point of view, they simply said that they had heard it on the BBC. Now, they say they have seen and read it on WhatsApp.

When I tell them that WhatsApp forwards can be motivated and essentially made up by those wanting to push a particular point of view, I get brushed aside. That’s the credibility that WhatsApp has these days, among many people.

As Roland Barthes writes in an essay titled The World of Wrestling which is a part of a collection of essays titled Mythologies: “The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so: it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees.”

Hence, people see the WhatsApp messages, read them and believe them. They don’t question them in most cases. In fact, psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman conducted a very interesting experiment to show that people tend to go with what they see and end up being majorly wrong in the process.

As Michael Lewis writes in The Undoing Project—A Friendship that Changed the World: “A bunch of high school students [were given] five seconds to guess the answer to a math question.” There were two groups. The first group was asked to estimate the product of 8×7×6×5×4 ×3 ×2 ×1. The second group was asked to estimate the product of 1×2×3×4×5×6×7×8.

Both the groups were essentially asked the same question, with only the order of digits being reversed. As Lewis writes: “Five seconds wasn’t long enough to actually do the math: The kids had to guess. The two groups answers should have been at least roughly the same, but they weren’t even roughly.”

The actual answer to the question is 40,320. The median answer for the first group was 2,250 and for the second group was 512. The first group’s answer was more than four times, the second group’s. As Lewis writes: “The reason the kids in the first group guessed a higher number for the first sequence was that they had used 8 as a starting point, while the kids in the second group had used 1.”

Hence, depending on what they saw, the kids came up with what they thought the right answer was. Kahneman calls this what you see is all there is and that explains why people believe what they see and read on WhatsApp so much.

The column originally appeared in Bangalore Mirror on January 18, 2017.

Why Samsung is the new Nokia

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Vivek Kaul

I grew up reading The Indian Express. But a few years back my parents started subscribing to The Times of India after my mother complained once too often that “Express main masala nahi hai!”
The fall of 
The Indian Express along with The Statesman which used to be two very good newspapers (Express still is. And I haven’t read Statesman in a while, though at a point of time it was regarded the best English newspaper in Asia) are nowhere in the reckoning now, as far as the number of readers is concerned.
What happened? To some extent the papers remained stuck to their past glory and did not see the rise of the new Indian middle class, which along with hardcore news also wanted a dash of 
masala every morning. They wanted to know how the Congress party was screwing up the country but they also wanted to know whether Amitabh and Rekha smiled when their eyes met at a film industry party. 
The Times of India 
was the only newspaper which caught on to this trend (or should we say created it), raked in the moolah and got way ahead of almost all its competitors in the race.
So what is the point of I am trying to make? Incumbents who are firmly entrenched in their businesses more often than not fail to see the rise of a new category. The most recent example of the same is Nokia, which after being the top mobile phone brand in the world for a period of nearly 14 years has lost out to Samsung.
And the reason for this is very simple. Nokia did not see the smart phone. There are loads of other examples of existing companies that did not see the rise of a new category.
Sony invented the walkman but allowed Apple to walkway with the MP3 player market. RCA which was big radio manufacturer had earlier allowed Sony to walkaway with the pocket radio market. Southwest Airlines created an entirely new low cost airline market which gradually spread to all other parts of the world. Incumbents like Panam, Delta, Singapore Airlines and British Airways did not spot this opportunity.
In India Hindustan Lever Ltd did not spot the low cost detergent market, Nirma did that. Amabassador and Premier Padmini which were the only two car companies in India did not see the rise of the small car market which Maruti Suzuki captured. More recently Maruti did not spot the growing demand for diesel cars and continued to be primarily a company which manufactured petrol cars. It lost out in the process.
Bharti Beetel, revolutionised the landline phone market in India with the introduction of push button phones. But it got into the mobile phone market very late. And this was a huge business opportunity missed given that Bharti Airtel became the largest mobile phone company in India and could have easily bundled Beetel mobile phones along with Airtel mobile phone connections. An entire first generation of Indian mobile phone users could have ended up using Beetel mobile phones. Kodak a company which invented digital photography went bankrupt recently. And BBC, the most respected news organisation in the world did not see the rise of the concept of 24 hour news and left it to CNN to capture that market.
As marketing consultants Al and Laura Ries,write in 
War In the Boardroom, “The biggest mistake of logical management types is their failure to see the rise of a new category. They seem to believe that categories are firmly fixed and a new one seldom arises.”
And why is that? The answer lies in the fact that incumbent companies are too cued into what they are doing at that point of time. A brilliant example is Kodak. How could a company which invented digital photography go bankrupt because of it? Mark Johnson explains this phenomenon in 
Seizing the White Space – Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal. As he writes “In 1975, Kodak engineer, Steve Sasson invented the first camera, which captured low-resolution black-and-white images and transferred them to a TV. Perhaps fatally, he dubbed it “filmless photography” when he demonstrated the device for various leaders at the company.”
Sasson was asked to keep quiet about his invention. This was because Kodak was the biggest producer of photo films at that point of time. And any invention that did not use photo films would have hit the core business of the company. So Kodak ignored the segment. By the time it realised the importance of the segment other companies like Canon had already jumped in and become big players. Also by then brand Canon had come to be associated very strongly with the digital camera whereas Kodak continued to be associated with the old photo film.
The same would have stood true for Beetel in India. They would have been making good money on selling landline phones and wouldn’t have seen any sense in entering the nascent mobile phone market in India where calls were priced at Rs 16 per minute. And by the time the market took off brands like Nokia would have been firmly entrenched. Amabssador and Premier Padmini fell victim to the same thing.
Another excellent example of this is Xerox. “Just think of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, which famously owned the technologies that helped catapult Apple (the graphical user interface, the mouse), Adobe (post script graphical technology) and 3Com (Ethernet technology) to success,” writes Johnson.
But Xerox executives were busy selling the photocopier. They did not have time for these small tinkerings that seemed to have been happening in their company labs. The photocopiers brought in all the money and their attention was firmly focussed on them.
Sony is a really interesting example in this trend. Sony had created the Walkman and the entire market of listening to music anywhere and everywhere. But they somehow failed to latch onto the MP3 player market which was captured by the likes of Apple iPod. An MP3 player was just an extension of the Walkman.
Other than being an electronics company Sony had also morphed into a music company owning the rights to the music of some of the biggest pop and rockstars. Hence Sony supporting MP3 technology would mean one of the biggest music companies in the world supporting the free copying and distribution of music because that was what MP3 was all about.
And with this logic which might have seemed perfectly fine at that point of time Sony lost out to Apple in the MP3 space. Also, over the years music became free anyway.
Getting back to where we started, Nokia made the same mistake. It did not see the rise of the smart phone category as other players like Samsung and Apple did. And the reason was simple. Even though smart phones have been around for a while only now have they really taken over the market because they are robust enough. Hence, as long as the basic phones of Nokia were selling well, as they were till a couple of years back, it had no real interest in thinking about the smart phone market.
By the time the company caught on with the launch of Lumia other international players like Samsung and Apple already had a major presence in the market. In India the smart phone space has loads of local players like Micromax battling for the market as well.
And so Nokia lost the race!
The interesting thing is that Samsung will also will lose the race when the next evolution in the mobile phone space happens. It will be too focused on the smart phone.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on December 20, 2012

(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected]

Babri Masjid: 20 saal baad, what has changed, what hasn't!

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Vivek Kaul
My standard tenth exams got over on March 12, 1993. It was late evening, around 6pm, and I was having a vanilla ice-cream (or was it chocolate I don’t remember) in a cone along with some of my friends standing outside Firayalal, the premier shopping destination for clothes in the city of Ranchi, where I grew up.
A small kid started pestering me to buy a copy of Sandhya Ranchi Express, an evening newspaper that had been recently launched. I tried to shoo him away. He wouldn’t go and was determined to sell the last copy that he had.
The trouble was I did not have a single rupee in my pocket. My parents never came around to the idea of giving me pocket money, being forever bothered that I would use it to buy the music cassette of the latest Hindi film, which was one of the two interests I had at that point of time. The other one being religiously listening to Cibaca Sangeet Mala, a countdown show of Hindi film songs hosted by the one and only Ameen Sayani every Monday on the government owned radio channel Vividh Bharti (He started with Radio Ceylon and during the later years moved to Vividh Bharti).
My friend Anshuman, who had also paid for the ice-cream (if I remember correctly), first gave me a stare and then a one rupee coin. I bought the newspaper. A small piece of news which seemed to have been inserted at the last moment as the paper went to press talked about bomb blasts in Bombay (now Mumbai).
Those were the days when evening newspapers were not meant to be taken seriously. They usually had their share of masala and gossip. I thought the news about the blast was not true and would have just been put in to hopefully sell a few copies more.
In fact I was sure of this primarily because all kinds of news that appeared in the local newspapers. A few days after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991, a local newspaper had even gone to the extent of reporting that he was alive, living in the United States of America (USA) and having fun there.
The news about the blasts in Bombay turned out to be true. By the time I reached home, people had tuned into BBC Radio on the short wave and confirmed the same. Those were the days when people did not believe in anything unless they had heard it on the BBC (and if not them, someone else they knew had because it was not always easy to tune into the right frequency).
The evening news on Doordarshan, first in Hindi and then in English, also reported on the blasts. I went to sleep peacefully that night, the first time since January 29, when I had started preparing for my tenth standard exams, on the day Vinod Ganpat Kambli made his test debut and batted ahead of his schoolmate Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. The blasts in what was a ‘far away’ Bombay did not effect a small town boy who was just happy that his exams were done and out of the way.
Investigations soon revealed that the blasts were carried out on the orders of the much feared Dawood Ibrahim, the mafia don who ruled what was then Bombay. By the time the news of his involvement came out, Ibrahim had left the country , never to come back. It is said that Ibrahim carried out the blasts to revenge the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the riots that followed against the Muslim population in the city of Bombay.
Babri Masjid in Ayodhya was demolished on December 6, 1992, twenty years to this day. I clearly remember that rumours were abuzz in the colony that we lived in, about the Masjid having been brought down. The rumour mongers used the usual ploy of saying “BBC par bol diya hai (they have said it on the BBC)” to give a kind of an authenticity to what they were trying to spread.
But cable television had already arrived by then. We had got a connection on February 22, 1992, on the day India lost to England in Benson and Hedges cricket World Cup being played in Australia and New Zealand.
Earlier on the same day the New Zealand captain Martin Crowe had surprised the entire cricket fraternity by asking the off spinner Dipak Patel to open the bowling in the match against Australia. Something like this had never happened before.
And it was on cable TV we got some confirmation of the Babri Masjid having been brought down. The BBC (television and not radio) showed some kar sevaks getting on the dome of the Babri Masjid and starting to hit it with rods and hammers.
Lal Krishna Advani of the Bhartiya Janata Party and Ashok Singhal of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad could be seen rushing towards the disputed structure and asking kar sevaks to stop what they were doing. Whether they really meant it or not is something even they won’t be able to tell.
Those were the only visuals of that were broadcast on the BBC. In fact from what I remember it was not BBC’s original footage and they were broadcasting a tape that was put together by news agency ANI. The media was thrown out soon after the kar sevaks starting demolishing the Masjid and those are the only visuals that anyone ever got of the Masjid being brought down.
The only other news show was on Doordarshan and nobody of course believed what they were reporting. So people would tune into BBC on their cable television and waited with a baited breath to hear something being reported on the scene in Ayodhya and the riots that had broken out in different parts of the country in the aftermath of the Masjid being brought down. Given that a lot of people did not have cable television, they waited with a baited breath in homes of people who had it.
Schools, colleges and offices had been closed down and a curfew had been imposed on the city of Ranchi. Shoot at sight orders had also been given. But we were safe inside the confines of the CMPDI colony. I was advised to start preparing for my tenth standard exams which were due in less than three months time. I remember studying some Chemistry or at least pretending to, just to ensure that my mother did not bother me too much. And I was really kicked to know that the word Oxygen is an oxymoron. But being the news junkie that I was, I was more interested in all the rumours that were going around rather than studying for my tenth standard exams.
Most of the people around me were happy at what had happened. “Advani ji ne kar dikhaya (Advani ji has got it done),” was an oft repeated phrase. People also talked about the time when Advani had come visiting us in October 1990.
Advani was on his Rath Yatra across the country starting from the Somnath Temple in Gujarat on September 25, 1990. He arrived late one night to stay “overnight” in the guest house in our colony primarily because there wasn’t a hotel good enough for him in the city of Ranchi. At least, that’s what the rumour was.
In fact, in the years to come I saw a spate of BJP leaders from Atal Behari Vajpayee (who was sitting in the front seat of a Maruti Omni), Murli Manohar Joshi and the late Pramod Mahajan, all stopping overnight at the guest house.
Early next morning, before Advani was supposed to leave, a small crowd, which included me, had gathered in front of the guest house. He came out and was requested to speak a few words. I don’t remember anything of what he said except the last line, which was “Saugandh Ram ki khaate hain, mandir wohin banayenge”.
He was out of the place in five minutes. But the crowd that had gathered continued to mingle. Some were happy to have seen him. Some were amazed to know that his so called rath wasn’t actually one. Some women spoke about the glow Advani ji had on his face. Some others said “kam bole par bahut acha bole. (he spoke less but spoke very well).”
And some others who thought they were worried about the state of the nation asked “mandir banega ki nahi? (Will the temple be made or not?)”. With the Babri Masjid out of the way the first step towards the making of the temple had been made.
The slogan going around was “ye to kewal jhanki hai, kaashi mathura baaki hai (This was a just a trailer, Kashi and Mathura are still remaining).” Ranchi was a hardcore BJP constituency returning its candidate Ram Tahal Choudhary to the Lok Sabha four times in a row between 1991 and 2004.
People who had gone to Ayodhya from Ranchi as kar sevaks became minor celebrities once they came back. One of my older friends claimed to have met one such person who had told him “ke masjidwa ekbak hi gir gaya (The masjid fell rather suddenly with ekbak being the Ranchi lingo for suddenly)”.
So those were the days.
Its late in the night as I sit writing this and wonder about all that has changed since December 6, 1992.
Vinod Kambli now sports a weird hairstyle and recently had an angioplasty. He never fulfilled all the potential he showed in the early 1990s. He is probably the only test player to have played just 18 tests with a batting average of 54.
Captains now regularly use spin bowlers to open the bowling in T20s, one day internationals as well as test cricket. Ravichandran Ashwin, India’s latest spinning sensation is regarded as the best new ball spinner in the world. Talk about oxymorons!
Ranchi now has much better hotels. And it no longer votes for the BJP. Since 2004 its turned to the Congress and voted for Subodh Kant Sahay, who till very recently was a minister in the Union government but has since been dropped due to his role in the coalgate scam.
Nobody listens to the BBC Radio in India any more. Very few watch its World News Service on cable television. And Cibaca Sangeet Mala has been long gone.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee went onto become the Prime Minister of India and started travelling in bullet proof BMWs, with the days when a small town boy could catch a glimpse of him sitting in the front seat of a Maruti Omni being over.
Pramod Mahajan was murdered by his younger brother.
Ameen Sayani’s voice still continues to be strong. On the two occasions I have heard him live in the last two years I went back to the time two decades back when life was fun and simple.
The internet hindus who are highly educated, well paid and normally upper caste, have replaced the kar sevaks who largely belonged to the middle class and the lower classes.
Today we have mobile phones and the internet unlike two decades back. If an incident like this were to happen, the media would cover it in a more detailed manner. If they are thrown out like they had been 20 years back, the kar sevaks (or should we be saying the internet Hindus) would be recording the event on their mobile phones and uploading pictures on Facebook with messages like “I was there.”
But some things are still the same.
Dawood Ibrahim continues to be a free man.
Lal Krishna Advani still goes on rath yatras whenever he does get the time and still hopes to become the Prime Minister of this country some day.
Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar ironically continues to look like the best batsman we have.
And Rahul Gandhi is still a bachelor!

The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on December 6, 2012.
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected])

What Mamata can learn from Surf, BBC, Sony and Nokia


Vivek Kaul

Vidhu Vinod Chopra the producer of the superhit 3 Idiots made a movie called 1942:A Love Story which was released in 1994. The movie had soulful songs and could have been a big comeback for the great R D Burman. But alas that never happened. Pancham da died of a heart attack before the movie was released.
The movie set during the days of the British Raj starts as a love story between the hero Anil Kapoor and the heroine Manisha Koirala, who keep singing all the beautiful songs composed by Burman in the first half of the movie. But throughout the first half all the characters other than the hero and the heroine keep saying this one line “shubhankar da aa rahe hain”, building the expectations of the audience for his arrival.
Shubhankar da (played by Jackie Shoff) finally arrives around 30 seconds before the interval. Until that moment the movie was a love story. Then on it becomes a movie on the freedom struggle, which in this day and age would have been called a political thriller.
As was the case in the movie, there comes a time in life of individuals as well businesses when the story has to change. The past has to be dumped and made insignificant and a new story needs to emerge.
This is something that Mamata Banerjee, rabble rouser par excellence and the only angry young man in the country with the days of Bachchan long gone, needs to realize. She built her career and life around trying to throw out the Left Parties out of West Bengal and finally after more than two decades of hard work and sheer persistence she succeeded.
If ever there was an example of an individual not giving up and finally succeeding she was it. But after becoming the Chief Minister of West Bengal what is her story? She still seems to be working on the same story of rabble rousing against the Left everywhere all the time, and holding them responsible for everything that is happening in the state of West Bengal. From rapes of women to lack of governance!
The irony of course is that she is the government now. Her level of paranoia against the Left is reaching extreme proportions now. Most recently she called the students of Jadhavpur University CPI-M cadres. As she said “They are the CPI-M cadres. I am not going to reply. I will give reply to questions from common people. I am sorry to say you belong to CPI-M. You are SFI (Student Federation of India, the student wing of CPI-M) cadres. We know all of you.”
While Bengal may be full of CPI-M cadres this is like stretching it a little too much. It is time that Mamata Banerjee changed her anti-left story.
There are a few things that Banerjee can learn from businesses from around the world which experience this phenomenon time and again. Some learn and adapt, others don’t and for some others by the time they realise that things have changed, it’s already too late.
Take the case of Nokia, the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world. The company started in 1865 as a groundwood pulp mill. It gradually became an industrial conglomerate and among other things produced paper products, tyres, footwear, communication cables and consumer electronics.
In the early 1990s the company realised that its story had to change. It decided to concentrate on the telecommunication business. It gradually sold out a host of its other businesses. The change of story helped the company become the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world.
But the company missed out on the smart phone revolution completely. By the time it changed its story and started concentrating on smart phones, other companies had already moved in and captured the market. A host of smaller companies from Micromax to Karbon Mobiles and many more are giving Nokia a run for its money in the Indian market.
Why did this happen? For the simple reason, like Mamata, the company remained attached to its earlier story.
There are other such examples as well. When it came to reliable trustworthy news there wasn’t a bigger brand than the British Broadcasting Corporation(BBC). The company did not see the story changing and the rise of 24hour news channels. CNN grabbed the opportunity and broadcast the Gulf War live into homes. Sony is another great example. The company changed the entire music business with the launch of the Walkman. But failed to see the story changing and handed over the mp 3 player market to the likes of Apple, on a platter.
Bharti Beetel which revolutionised land line phones in India by launching push button phones failed to see the story changing and remained stuck to selling push button phones, when more and more consumers were moving to mobile phones. Ironically, its sister company Airtel became the biggest mobile phone company in India.
The company has recently started selling mobile phones. Now imagine, during the days when Airtel was a growing company, Bharti could have sold its own mobile phones (under the Beetel brand) to consumers who bought an Airtel connection and thus could have been one of the biggest mobile phone companies in India.
Those who do see the story changing and change their stories accordingly benefit from it. An oft quoted example is that of Nirma and Wheel. The Nirma detergent started selling at Rs 3.50 per kg at a time when Hindustan Lever’s (now Hindustan Unilever) Surf used to sell for around Rs 15 per kg. The low price of Nirma made it accessible to consumers, who till then really couldn’t afford the luxury of washing clothes using a detergent and had to use soap instead.
To Hindustan Lever’s credit they did not remain stuck in their past, realised that the story had to change, and thus went ahead and launched their Nirma killer “Wheel” detergent, which eventually beat the sales of Nirma.
The moral of the story from all these examples from Surf to Nokia to Sony to Bharti is simple. At times in lives of individuals as well as companies the story that had worked previously needs to be dumped. It is time for Mamata to come up with a new story. She is no longer in the opposition when blaming the Left for every problem in the state of West Bengal was her story. Now she is where the Left was earlier.
If she doesn’t change her story and come up with a new one, her innings as a Chief Minister is going to be a short lived on. The people of West Bengal need to know what does the new Mamata stand for?
(The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on May 19,2012. http://www.firstpost.com/politics/what-mamata-can-learn-from-surf-bbc-sony-and-nokia-314738.html)
(Vivek Kaul is a writer and can be reached at [email protected])